Pursuing pronatalism : Non-governmental organisations and population and family policy in Sweden and Finland, 1940s–1950s

The aim of this article is to nuance notions of ‘pronatalism’ by applying it as an analytical concept for studying population and family policy Sweden and Finland in the 1940s and 1950s. This endeavour is pursued by analysing the ideologies and practices of three pronatalist non-governmental organisations from Sweden, Finland and Swedish Finland: the Swedish Population and Family Federation (Befolkningsförbundet Svenska Familjevärnet), the Finnish Population and Family Welfare League (Väestöliitto) and the Swedish Population Federation in Finland (Svenska Befolkningsförbundet i Finland, SBF). All three organisations promoted family-friendly policies, emphasised the need for wide-spread population policy education or ‘propaganda’, and framed pronatalist population policy as a collective issue of the nation or ‘people’, yet with different motivations and framings. Väestöliitto and SBF related the so-called population question to an external threat: the Soviet Union that threatened the geopolitical status of Finland, and the pressure of the Finnish-speaking majority, respectively. In addition, SBF saw that the Finland-Swedes were delusional about their demographic and cultural vulnerability and were hence causing their own demise. Familjevärnet, on the other hand, first and foremost connected family and population policy to the furthering of welfare, solidarity and democracy, primarily within Sweden but also transnationally. Respectively, the organisations also framed motherhood slightly differently. Väestöliitto and SBF portrayed procreation as a civic duty and motherhood as the most important role of women. Familjevärnet also viewed motherhood as an important and natural role for women, yet not as an exclusive civic duty. Rather, it emphasised that all citizens had a duty to contribute to a positive demographic development and family-friendly society, either through procreation or by partaking in the cost of bringing up children.Peer reviewe

Cultural Policy : Establishing a Modern Category

This dissertation analyses the formation of Swedish cultural policy in the twentieth century and the emergence of a modern concept of cultural policy. The aim is to historicise this concept by opening up the process through which it was established. The dissertation explores different aspects of this process: the use of the word cultural policy (kulturpolitik), the ambitions in the 1960s to establish a form of knowledge production relevant in cultural policy making and the attempts made by various official authorities in the 1960s and early 1970s to identify and manage the field of concerns defined as belonging to cultural policy, thus demarcating culture as a formal area of policy making. I view these as examples of practices where the category of cultural policy was elaborated and established in a form widely recognized today. Accompanying my attempts to historicise the modern concept of cultural policy is an interest in how the history of cultural policy has generally been conceived. In previous research devoted to the history of cultural policy an analytical sense of cultural policy has tended to overrule the understanding(s) of cultural policy found in the historical sources. As a consequence, the histories of cultural policy have left out what historically was identified as cultural policy, thus leaving the historical grounds for the modern concept of cultural policy partly hidden. In the first empirical chapter I examine the uses of the word cultural policy when it was introduced in the Swedish language in the late nineteenth century until the 1950s. From a multitude of usages, I suggest that it was in the mid-twentieth century that a more consistent vocabulary developed, with “cultural policy” referring to political endeavors aiming at a nation’s domestic cultural life. In the second empirical chapter I investigate how scientific conceptualisations and operationalisations rendered culture available for scientific, political and administrative undertakings, and in the third chapter I study how culture was demarcated as a formal area of policy making. The chapters reveal different aspects of the historical process through which the category of cultural policy was established in its present shape

När kultur var i rörelse : Kulturbegreppets förändring under sextiotalet, speglad genom tidskriften Ord&Bild

The aim of this thesis is to analyse and problematize the concept of culture and its changes during the 1960s. By examining articles out of the periodical Ord&Bild 1962-1972, I show how an aesthetically marked concept, closely related to the concept of art, changes into an anthropological perspective where attention is drawn to the social, economical, political and ideological aspects. This change is viewed in relation to the works of three prominent cultural theorists from the 1960s: Raymond Williams, Marshall McLuhan and Herbert Marcuse. The change that the concept of culture undergoes can be illuminated in several ways. Epistemologically questions of art, its objectivity and relation to reality, are replaced by questions of the function of art and of its role as reproducing ideas and norms of a bourgeois society. Economical and social aspects are used as critical factors in discussing the role and conception of culture, a perspective that gives the discussion a political and ideological edge. Another related track of change is that attention is brought to the relationship between culture as norms and values and culture as art, also known as “high culture”. This means that the idea of an universal culture is criticized for its excluding tendencies. By the end of the decade, the concept of culture has lost its universal meaning and is, among other things, used to endorse and emphasize a specific identity. Culture is key concept in a critical discussion about society and is also seen as a way of changing this society. Culture can then be viewed as a “concept of struggle”. The change that the concept of culture goes through is related to changes in the society as a whole, as well as to underlying ideas and visions about the society. The change must not be understood as a consequence of the political escalation during the 1960s, but is to be seen as a development parallel to this radicalization of society